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Page 55
"When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious 'Have you got
your lantern?' and a gratified 'Yes!' That was the shibboleth, and very
needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none
could recognize a lantern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell.
Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger,
with nothing but the thwarts above them,--for the cabin was usually
locked,--or chose out some hollow of the links where the wind might
whistle overhead. Then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the
bull's-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge,
windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting
tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the
cold sand of the links, or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and
delight them with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I cannot give some
specimens!... But the talk was but a condiment, and these gatherings
themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The
essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, the
slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping, whether to
conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public,--a mere pillar of
darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of
your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to
exult and sing over the knowledge.
"It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid.
It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every
case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not
done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's
imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud:
there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells
delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will
have some kind of bull's-eye at his belt."
... "There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life,--the
fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into
song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a
stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and
of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not
only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is
native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him
and chuckles, and his days are moments. With no more apparatus than an
evil-smelling lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life
that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands,--seeking for
that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard
to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a
knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which
the bird _has_ sung to _us_, that fills us with such wonder when we turn
to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of
life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and
cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are
careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring
nightingale we hear no news."
... "Say that we came [in such a realistic romance] on some such business
as that of my lantern-bearers on the links, and described the boys as
very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all
of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it
certainly was. To the eye of the observer they _are_ wet and cold and
drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of a
recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern."
"For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may
hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in
the mysterious inwards of psychology.... It has so little bond with
externals ... that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life,
for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy.... In
such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with
his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court
deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment;
but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed
through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism
were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch
some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism,
always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy
resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing."
"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the
sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one
who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is
meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of
realistic books.... In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted
atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and
seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough,
instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset;
each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth
among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his
brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall."[D]
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